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Monday, November 28, 2016

`What Places Look Like When I am Not There'

A
landlubber is forever leery of the sea. Sure, it’s beautiful, occasionally
awe-inspiring, but always ominous and best appreciated from a distance,
preferably by way of Melville or Conrad. I have a colleague who was born in
Pensacola, Fla., and has lived in Houston (an hour’s drive from the Gulf of
Mexico) since he was a child. He owns a boat, as does his sister. He surfs. A
surfboard hangs on the wall of his office, next door to mine. He keeps a
fishing shack on the Gulf and fishes almost every weekend. He is amphibian. I
am strictly (non-aquatic) mammalian, as was Philip Larkin in “Absences” (The
Less Deceived, 1955):

“Rain
patters on a sea that tilts and sighs.

Fast-running
floors, collapsing into hollows,

Tower
suddenly, spray-haired. Contrariwise,

A wave
drops like a wall: another follows,

Wilting
and scrambling, tirelessly at play

Where
there are no ships and no shallows.

“Above the
sea, the yet more shoreless day,

Riddled by
wind, trails lit-up galleries:

They shift
to giant ribbing, sift away.

“Such
attics cleared of me! Such absences!”

What is
most absent is the human – nothing but water and sky, though some of the
metaphors (“Fast-running floors’) are drawn from the human realm. Larkin’s sea
is not hostile or malignant, merely alien and cosmically indifferent. He
captures some of the complex physics of the ocean, which is never at rest,
though an oceanographer complained to Larkin that “it is only waves coming in
to the beach that roll over and drop like a wall.” The poet admitted his
ignorance of wave behavior, which, he said, “seriously damaged the poem from a
technical viewpoint.” As he often does, Larkin makes unexpected but
appropriate choices of word – noting, for instance, that a wave is “wilting.”
Larkin seems to have been particularly proud of “Absences.” In 1962, he
contributed it to an anthology titled Poet’s Choice, and wrote of it:

“I suppose
I like `Absences’ (a) because of its subject matter—I am always thrilled by the
thought of what places look like when I am not there; (b) because I fancy it
sounds like a different, better poet rather than myself. The last line, for
instance, sounds like a slightly unconvincing translation from a French
symbolist. I wish I could write like this more often.”